They did it. They canceled Culture.
In 2018, Amazon announced that it had picked up the rights to adapt Iain M. Banks’ epic space opera novel Consider Phlebas, as part of a broader effort to develop a bigger catalog of shows that would have “global appeal” for audiences, on par with the likes of Game of Thrones.
While Amazon has produced several shows that fit that mandate, like The Expanse, Carnival Row, The Boys, Jack Ryan, and others, its potential Culture series won’t join that lineup, according to Den of Geek.
The site spoke with Dennis Kelly, who is about to launch a new series for the streaming service, Utopia, based on the series from Channel 4, as well as The Third Day, for HBO. According to Kelly, “we’d talked about it for two or three years and it went a certain way along. I’d written probably 20-30 pages of the bible, but once I got a sense that it wasn’t going to happen, I had to stop writing because you become emotionally attached to the work.”
Ultimately, he says, it sounds like the lack of interest came not from Amazon, but from Banks’ estate. “I just think the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material. They hadn’t seen anything [he had written], it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason.”
In a statement to The Guardian, Banks’ estate said that “timing wasn’t quite right,” and that it’s “hugely grateful for all the care and creative energy that went into the early stages of the project.”
It seems that other shows that Amazon announced alongside Consider Phebas aren’t happening either: Ringworld doesn’t seem to be moving forward, while the adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has since moved over to HBO’s new streaming service, HBO Max. But, Amazon certainly isn’t hurting for big adaptations: it picked up the rights for a series (for at least two seasons) set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Fallout, William Gibson’s The Peripheral, and got halfway through filming the first season of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time before the COVID shutdown.
Still, it’s a shame that an adaptation of Banks’ series won’t be going forward: over the course of 10 novels, he developed an incredible, epic world that remains one of the most beloved, intellectually-stimulating science fiction stories out there.
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Consider Phlebas
Interesting that the Banks Estate passed on it. I always thought if it failed, it would be because it’s unfilmable (to do the novel justice, you’d need a James Cameron Avatar level of budget per episode).
Although, that said, this appears to have been a passion project for Jeff Bezos, who’s an enormous fan of the books and can obviously afford to hurl money at it until it works. I do wonder if the Estate considered what Banks’s attitude would likely be towards Bezos (Banks was…sceptical, to put it mildly, of ultrarich oligarchs) and decided that it might be something that he’d not have approved of if he was still with us.
This is a real shame. Bank’s Culture books would have made a fantastic TV series. One more reason to hate 2020.
Too bad. Banks hoped that his Culture novels were taken to the screen. He especially hoped for Consider Phlebas. He even envisioned some key scenes, like the seas in the Vavatch orbital and the fight when leaving said orbital.
Maybe some other time…
@3: He even said that he’d happily see Arnold Schwarzenegger cast in Consider Phlebas if it got the books on screen. That said, he was virulently against ultracapitalism and I suspect would have major issues with Amazon adapting them.
This would have pretty much sealed a decision by me to subscribe to Amazon. The Culture is one of my absolute favourite series and the chance of seeing it on a screen would have been too much to pass up. The books still look great in my head, though.
@2 Jeff Nichols — Yeah, I’m awfully disappointed too, although I’d have preferred The Player of Games as a starter.
A sad day indeed.
@1 I agree that it would require a big budget to be done right, and the one saving grace of it not being made now is that in the future, budgets will be bigger and CGI will be better, so maybe if they make it in 10 years, it will be a better show than if it came out in 2022.
Clearly, this means Tor.com should fill in the loss of Culture-related content.
Perhaps by continuing or making a fresh attempt at the 2018 Culture reread that stopped for unknown reasons…